Book Information: Last Voyage of Odysseus, the

The Last Voyage of Odysseus is based on the ancient Greek myth of Telegonus, the son of the goddedd Circe and the hero Odysseus, conceived during the year Odysseus spent on the sorceress's island, Aeaea. More generally, the legend contains the story of what happened after the Odyssey to Circe and Telegonus, Penelope and Telemachus, and Odysseus himself.

The myth is an obscure one, the subject of one of the myriad of lost epics. The major events set forth in the myth, even through the confusion of conflicting versions and secondhand accounts, seem the inevitable conclusion to the pattern begun by the Odyssey. One by one, like threads on Circe's loom, the unfinished elements of the epic of Odysseus are drawn in and woven into a single fabric of surprisingly symmetrical pattern.

Impressed by the irresistable symmetry of the tale, Carey has taken from the many versions of the legend those incidents which seemed to define that pattern. Here, the prophecy of the ghost of Teiresias, made in the course of the Odyssey itself, merges with the consequences of the murder of the suitors to send Odysseus on a journey of exile; the purposes of two goddesses clash and combine, finally bringing the elements of the myth into resolution—the mortal woman to the goddess, the sons to the mothers, and the hero to the sea.

Original title: The Last Voyage of OdysseusOriginal languages:
English